When I first started advocating for open borders back in 2005 or 2006, and then in my 2010 book Principles of a Free Society, I was a bit starry-eyed. I was zealous. I felt sure I discerned what justice demanded. I was advocating for a better world. Above all, I wanted to help the billions of people in this world whose lives, by American standards, are desperately poor and deprived, or who live in fear, or both. I knew that open borders was the best way to do it. I didn’t think my odds of bringing that about were good. Not at all. One in a million maybe. But the stakes were so high that the gamble (of my time) still seemed worth the effort. At any rate, I could escape my own guilt for being part of the system of exclusion through paying my taxes and thereby funding deportations. American democracy would march on unperturbed either way. It was rock solid, eternal, almost a law of nature.

Eighteen years later, the stakes look very different. 

On November 5, 2024, a majority of Americans cast their votes for president for Donald Trump, a convicted felon and adulterer, who had embezzled money from his businesses to pay hush money to a porn star he had slept with, who stole classified documents from the White House, twice impeached, but above all, who had incited an insurrection to try to hold onto the presidency after he was defeated in the 2020 election, and then persisted for four years in poisoning Americans’ minds with outrageous lies about the election having been stolen. 

The miracle of democracy lies in the way ruling parties let themselves lose elections and then voluntarily relinquish power. The loyal opposition opposes the ruling party, but supports the constitution, and trusts the ruling party to adhere to the constitution, submit to a fair election, and then yield power when the time comes. The strong norm of accepting election outcomes, and then allowing free speech and all the rest of the supporting practices that undergird electoral competition, is what ensures the maintenance of democracy, and even people who care less about democracy than about something else, like personal ambition or wealth or some policy issue like abortion, are incentivized to work within the democratic system because it’s too strong to be overcome. 

No longer. All that’s gone. It’s been proved that you can refuse to accept elections and the American people will still support you, maybe even more than before. Ambitious people will take note. Idealistic movements will take note. The rules of the game are now to play for. Will Trump declare himself dictator for life? Will his supporters stand by him if he does? If not he, how about the next celebrity sleazeball? What if Elon Musk has some really swell ideas for what he could do as dictator of America, and he thinks he can use Trump as a figurehead for a few years and then just cancel the 2028 election and take over? Should he try it? Why not? If it’s not his preference, should he do it defensively? He’ll be around for a while. If Elon doesn’t set himself up as dictator-for-life, will someone else do it, and then bump off Elon Musk, on the principle of cutting the tall poppies? Maybe he should do it unto others before they do it unto him. All the calculations change. It’s hard to put the Humpty Dumpty of democratic norms back together again. Even if there are honest elections in 2026 and the Democrats get a majority back, everyone has been put on notice that the center may not hold. The ceremonies of political innocence are being drowned, and mere anarchy is waiting to be loosed upon the world. 

Where did things go so wrong? There are a lot of answers to that question, but perhaps the most important of them all is that American democracy is well on its way to destroying itself through the cult of total immigration sovereignty, or what its supporters prefer to call, in misleadingly innocuous language, democratic control of immigration. 

The American politicians, under pressure from voters, who on this issue are rather simple-minded, sowed the seeds of the fall of democracy by promising to control immigration and appease a tidy, unreflective old preference for total immigration sovereignty. Lots of people reside on the territory of the United States without permission, but don’t do any harm. We could have chosen to be relaxed about that. Instead, we made a crisis out of it, not a real, practical crisis, but a crisis in public opinion, in the social imaginary. 

The state of public opinion made it a consistent course of least resistance for ambitious politicians to claim that they would “enforce the law.” In one sense, of course, they did. Passport controls were in place. Illegal entry was sometimes addressed through deportation. But there were still a lot of illegal immigrants on US soil, and some crossing the border. And illegal immigrants regularly mingled with law-abiding people and were treated with sympathy and respect, not like criminals. Even burdened with illegality, most of them seem to be better off than they would have been at home. In that sense, illegal immigration paid. So it didn’t seem like the law was being enforced. And it was always available as a cheap grievance for demagogues to exploit. 

Why did Americans blunder like this? Why weren’t they able to sensibly recognize the limits of immigration enforcement, and avoid letting themselves be scared into an imaginary crisis, to the point where all political morality got turned on its head, and bad became good, and the majority chose a demagogue who had built his brand precisely on loathsome thuggishness and an apparent lack of any scruples, seemingly in hopes that he might do the nasty things to immigrants that decent, law-abiding politicians couldn’t do?

What makes it odd is that Americans are able to form sensible views with respect to other victimless crimes. As I discussed on my Substack recently, in “The Limits of Immigration Enforcement,” illegal immigration is a victimless crime, and the peculiar difficulties of enforcement arise from that and resemble those of enforcing other victimless crimes. Americans’ laws prohibit some recreational drugs, underage drinking, prostitution, speeding on highways even in situations where it’s objectively safe, and many other activities that are victimless. They have their reasons, good and bad, for keeping these laws on the books. But they understand that enforcement has its limits, and a pretty sizable amount of law breaking is normal when there is no victim to claim redress, and law forbids what conscience does not forbid and may, depending on a variety of circumstances, require. Americans lost their heads about alcohol a century ago, and enacted a constitutional amendment that criminalized a victimless behavior. But it is now generally recognized as a mistake and a cautionary tale. People have rights, and the government derives its legitimate powers from consent of the governed, so laws against victimless crimes are anomalous and can’t be fully enforced. We’re used to it.

In general, Americans can understand that not everything is under democratic control. They understand that speech and religion are not under democratic control, on principle. Government has no right to legislate them. Family, too, must be voluntary and not governmentally mandated. The government can wish for a higher birth rate, but it must not try to compel one. Culture, too, must be free. No matter how much you dislike the latest fashions, you can’t command people what movies to like or what songs to sing. Again, you can influence prices through monetary policy, but it has to be, by and large, up to businesses to decide the price at which they sell their products. Americans have long possessed a healthy dose of libertarian common sense, and there are a lot of things that they don’t expect the government to be able to control. 

Why can’t they have the same insight about immigration? 

I think the heart of the matter is that immigration restrictions can’t be sensible because they have to be completely undemocratic, in a particularly important sense of that word. A general problem with democracy is the rational ignorance of the voters. They couldn’t possibly get informed about all the issues that depend on elections. And they don’t have an incentive even to really try. They know that no single vote will tip the election, so where does the personal ROI come from for doing the research you need in order to vote wisely? There may be some. Politics can become a form of entertainment, for better or worse, causing people to get informed in a certain way. And being knowledgeable might impress your friends, though again, that may be good or bad. It promotes both information and factionalism. But the most honest and unbiased reason to find out what the law is, is that as a subject of the government, you have to obey it. Citizens-as-subjects get first hand experience of the law, which they can then apply when they are wearing their citizen-as-voter hats. That’s why democracy works. That’s why partisan misinformation doesn’t have everything its own way. Citizens know why other victimless crimes are imperfectly enforced, because they know what it’s like to break the laws against them when they’re unreasonable. 

But citizens don’t have to find out what the immigration laws are because they’re not subject to them. So they never find out by experience how unjust and stupid the immigration laws are, and how often breaking them is the right thing to do. And voter opinion forms and festers in a bubble of ignorance.

Trump may not really lack any moral scruples. But he certainly acts the part on stage! Among thousands of other disgraceful obscenities, he told a crowd in Colorado that mass deportation would be “bloody.” Trump often lies. And I suspect that he’s lying that mass deportation will take place. It would take hard work. And it would be dangerous for him personally. Americans might just come to their senses and overthrow him. And some idealist might deliver him an assassin’s bullet in exchange for the crimes against humanity. He certainly didn’t seem overly keen to fulfill his promises during his first term. “Lock her up,” he said of his opponent Hillary Clinton. He didn’t lock her up. “Build the wall and make Mexico pay for it,” he said, but he didn’t even try. Oddly enough, his supporters didn’t seem to care. There’s something weird going on here, some kind of performance art that consists in playing a James Bond villain character all the time, for which this decadent country seems to have a perverse taste. I don’t understand it. But anyway, there’s at least some reason to think they want the evil act but not the evil deeds. Maybe his supporters really do want mass deportations. I don’t see why they’d say they do to pollsters, if they really don’t. But maybe they want it to be somehow immaculate, and if it started turning bloody, they’d actually turn against it. Here’s hoping that’s how they feel. And here’s hoping that Trump fears that’s how they feel, and would be afraid to test it. It’s not clear what he’d gain by carrying out his promises of mass deportation, personally. It would probably be a lot easier to take some token actions and then declare victory to his easily bamboozled followers. 

Anyway, the point is that I agree with Trump on one thing: if there are to be mass deportations, they’ll have to be bloody. Many of these people have roots here. Many have families here. Many have nothing to go back to. They’re from countries where they don’t speak the language. Some have no memories of their countries of origin. They may fear death by gang violence. If they go home. They may fear death as opponents of the regime. They may have no jobs to go back to, no homes. Some are never going to leave, no matter how bad things get. For others, a life of being dragged through air-conditioned courtrooms and brutality-free jail cells where food and water are provided will be pretty appealing compared to what they would face if driven back to their countries of legal nationality. No threat short of immediate, gruesome death will tip the cost-benefit analysis in favor of going back. 

So yes, Trump, if there are to be mass deportations, they’ll be bloody. Maybe they’ll be too bloody even to be mass deportations. Dead bodies can’t emigrate. In the Bible, King Herod ordered all the young babies killed so that the prophesied king would not live to supplant him. Pharaoh killed the babes of the Hebrews so that they wouldn’t become too numerous. It’s possible. We haven’t fallen quite that far morally, yet. But we’ve fallen very far, very fast.

That’s why no other politician in America has been quite wicked enough to convince voters he’s ready to perpetrate that. When a great democracy lets its whole public discourse be permeated by a lie, the biggest liar wins. Mainstream politicians collaborated in the lie that illegal immigration could be stopped. Now we’re reaping the terrible harvest of that lie, and American democracy may already be past the point of no return.

And so, while I’m still much concerned with the plight of the world’s poor, and I’m very eager to welcome as many of them as possible into the United States and other rich countries because that’s by far the most effective way to alleviate world poverty, I now have another objective, which is as important to me, and somewhat more acute, namely, to save American democracy. American democracy is critically ill right now, and I think its best hope of a cure is a nice medical injection of Open Borders Thought.

What do I mean by “open borders?” There was a time, a few years back, when in a certain very niche community, it could begin to be expected that people’s understanding of the term “open borders” would not be nearly the random outcome of an encounter between a thinking mind and a natural language phrase, but would be informed by a body of thought developed in a variety of places but especially on this blog. Activity has slackened since, although Bryan Caplan still bravely carries the torch as an influential public intellectual thoroughly schooled in the way of thinking. His book Open Borders, which for better or worse is in the format of a graphic novel, is probably the best introduction to it for the general reader.

But let me summarize it here in my own way:

1. People have a right to go where they need to go, and live where they need to live, in order to live according to the dictates of their conscience, and to support themselves and their families.
2. Also, people have a right to be with relatives and friends and others that they love, and to stay in the midst of communities where they are deeply rooted and have a strong network of social ties.
3. Governments do wrong to interfere with the rights in (1) and (2) except in exigent circumstances for narrow, compelling motives, principally the prevention of terrorism and contagious disease.
4. When governments violate the rights in (1) and (2) except in narrow circumstances as described in (3), they act unjustly.
5. Immigration policies that respect the rights described in (1) and (2), and that accept the constraints described in (3) and (4), comprise “open borders.”
6. Open borders do not imply that the crossing of borders should be free of any checkpoints or constraints. Rather, any such checkpoints and constraints should be administered with due regard to the right to migrate.
7. Open borders in no way imply that foreign-born persons residing in a democracy should enjoy the right to vote at any stage of their residency. 
8. Open borders do not, in general, imply equal treatment under the law for native-born persons or citizens and for foreigners. However, insofar as administrative law reflects understandings of basic justice and natural rights, a community may be required to provide similar justice services to the foreign-born, on pain of violating their rights.
9. Open borders are compatible with migration taxes.
10. Open borders are compatible with allowing or incentivizing labor market discrimination in favor of the native-born or citizens.

The above list answers many questions and raises more. To the long-running “problem” of illegal immigration, the answer is simply: stop. Stop fighting it. Stop worrying about it. Stop the deportations. We don’t necessarily have to grant all illegal immigrants citizenship, but let them live without fear and work and trade on a normal basis, more or less. 

But it’s a radical policy. Like abolishing slavery or communism or polygamy, abolishing migration restrictions points to dramatic changes which can’t be thoroughly foreseen. There’s good reason to think the changes will be mostly good. For example, it will raise world GDP dramatically, increase the manpower of liberal democracies relative to aggressive autocracies, and probably accelerate innovation. I believe, although it’s controversial, that many low-skill native-born Americans will see wages fall due to immigrant competition, but migration taxes can compensate them so that the large efficiency gains from open borders can benefit those on whom the first order impacts are negative. 

But to hash out all those debates is not my purpose here. Rather, I want to remind people that there’s an alternative to the self-destructive pursuit of total immigration sovereignty. I want people of good will to stop giving hostages to MAGA and other fascist-adjacent political cults by conceding that we need to “enforce the law,” “control the borders,” or whatever. We actually don’t. Total immigration sovereignty is not an indispensable condition of national survival. We don’t have to sacrifice every principle on the altar of an unattainable total control of who is present on the national territory. Some people are here without permission. That’s okay. We should be relaxed about that. We don’t have to keep pretending that it’s some kind of crisis. 

And if we’re really smart, we will institutionalize the truth that it’s okay. We’ll rethink the insistent prerogative of democratic control of immigration. We’ll learn to start our arguments about the subject from what is a nice, fair, decent way to treat people who want or need to be in this country for one reason or another. We’ll accept that whether to come here or not should mostly be up to them, not us. We’ll evolve towards open borders. We’ll get stronger, create a huge amount of opportunity for people from all over the world, and increase the wealth and freedom of the human race. And then we can elect nice, honest, democratic politicians again.

Finally, let me end by responding to a question from a friend about what Democrats should do now. I’m not a political consultant, and I’m not a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat. But if my advice to relax about illegal immigration is to impact policy, someone will need to run on it and win. That someone would presumably, for now, be the Democrats. So it’s a fair question. 

It’s tricky to answer because the Democrats pay a heavy political price for advocating a large policy and social agenda growing out of the Sexual Revolution, to which I’m totally unsympathetic. It would be easy for me to say to jettison all that, but not quite fair advice, since their priorities are different from mine. It would also stray too far from the current topic. Democrats could also try more of the same and hope to win, when Trump’s plans fail or fall short, or a better candidate comes along. But that feels like unsatisfying advice.

So I’ll offer a substantive concession: build the wall. That’s the compromise I’d suggest for the sake of political expediency on the path to the larger goal.

It might seem like a fatal concession to make, even as a tactical compromise. What could be more antithetical to open borders than a giant chain of concrete and wires marring the like southern border? 

But the moral significance of a physical barrier is slight, and it would be a small price to pay for many other things, such as a path to citizenship for current illegal immigrants, or more visas. The main goal isn’t a physically open border but an own society that respects immigrants’ rights, recognizes a right to migrate, and abjures the conceit that it can and should completely control entry and insist on total immigration sovereignty. 

And anyway, there are other ways to get here. Boats. Small planes. Tunnels. Shipping containers. So physical prevention of all illegal immigration isn’t realistic. What we need to do instead is overhaul public opinion and the social contract so that we can live and thrive with it.

Note: The views expressed in this piece may not reflect the views of the managers of this site or of the other writers who contribute to this site. Supporters of open borders hold a diversity of views on topics that intersect with open borders advocacy.

The long conflict over whether abortion should be legal in the U.S. will climax in the next few weeks when the Supreme Court issues a ruling on a case from Mississippi, one that is likely to overturn the Roe v Wade decision from 1973 which granted abortion rights. If the ruling leads to prohibitions on abortion in many states, it would increase the salience of the ability of women seeking abortions to cross both state and international borders. The open borders cause has more in common with opposition to the right to abortion, however. Both pro-life and open borders advocates seek the survival of and personal agency for the helpless and vulnerable, by, respectively, allowing nearly all fetuses to exit their mother’s body and allowing nearly all would-be immigrants to exit one society and join another.

Both fetuses and many would-be immigrants are in undeservedly helpless and vulnerable situations. The fetus did not choose to exist inside the body of the mother and has no control over their fate, which may be their termination, either intentionally or naturally. Many would-be immigrants are likewise undeservedly endangered, impoverished, and/or persecuted by the political, social, environmental, and economic conditions into which they happen to be born and grow up, and, aside from emigrating, they have few, if any, opportunities to improve their extremely constrained and imperiled situations. The conditions are characterized by violent conflict, widespread corruption and crime, government dysfunction, illiberal governance, discrimination, natural disasters, and/or unsafe climates. For example, a combination of drought, conflict, and economic collapse has resulted in most Afghans not having enough food to eat, and the lives of Afghan women are constrained by the Taliban who rule the country. The situations in Yemen, South Sudan, Syria, Haiti, Central America,  and Venezuela are similarly perilous and difficult. There are numerous other countries whose residents’ lives are circumscribed and threatened to various degrees by adverse conditions in those countries.

Open borders and anti-abortion policies would end the dependence of fetuses and would-be immigrants on the decisions of others as to whether they will escape their helplessness and vulnerability and gain security and personal agency. In the case of the fetus, personal agency is realized if they are allowed to be born and to develop into an adult. With abortion currently available as a legal option, healthcare workers, based on the wishes of their patients, may “… deliver babies safely and nurse premature infants back to health…” or they may use their skills to conduct abortions. In the case of would-be immigrants, Ilya Somin, the author of Free to Move, notes that the opportunity to cross international borders can constitute “a life-transforming event, often also a life-saving one.” However, currently the opportunity for Haitian, Afghan, Syrian, Venezuelan, and other would-be immigrants to gain control over their future and often to survive is limited by restrictive immigration policies formulated by the countries to which they desire to migrate.

It is acknowledged that illegal migration is an option for would-be immigrants that does not exist for fetuses. However, this option is unrealistic for those without the resources to finance often expensive attempts to cross a border illegally. Even those who attempt to cross a border without permission face terrible, often deadly consequences.

It also is recognized that the agency of women with unwanted pregnancies must be considered. These women deserve sympathy, especially when contraception has been used but failed to prevent pregnancy. Poor single women with unwanted pregnancies are in especially challenging circumstances. Yet even in these situations, the woman’s life is rarely threatened by the pregnancy, and she still retains some agency, albeit limited by a pregnancy. 

In addition to attempting to provide protection and agency to the helpless and vulnerable, there are other similarities between the open borders and anti-abortion causes. First, the groups that are championed by open borders and anti-abortion advocates are both viewed as threats by some. Nativists sometimes describe immigrants as invaders. Similarly, some supporters of the right to abortion characterize fetuses as intruders. While the pro-choice movement does not appear to promote an association between access to legal abortion and reductions in crime, some academics have provided evidence of a connection. Meanwhile, nativists have long associated immigrants with crime.  

Second, there is overlap in the available arguments for pro-life and open borders proponents with respect to the impacts on society if their desired policies are realized. Both open borders and pro-life advocates can emphasize the concrete macroeconomic benefits of their policy positions, in addition to moral arguments. Both fewer abortions and more immigration, by increasing the population of younger people, would mitigate the impact of low fertility rates in the United Stated and other wealthy, industrialized countries, as well as some less wealthy ones. While some have discounted the negative impacts of low fertility rates, others predict that “the strain of longer lives and low fertility, leading to fewer workers and more retirees, threatens to upend how societies are organized — around the notion that a surplus of young people will drive economies and help pay for the old… There is little sign of wage growth in shrinking countries, and there is no guarantee that a smaller population means less stress on the environment.” The material benefits of open borders in particular could be dramatic, as reflected in the academic literature that suggests massive increases in world GDP from free migration. as well as providing economic benefits at the national and local levels.

Third, there are keyhole solutions available to help address challenges associated with both prohibitions on abortions and open borders policies. In the case of abortion, Christine Emba of The Washington Post notes that “expanding access to contraception is an easy compromise that could lessen the need for abortion. Free, high-quality pre- and postnatal care, combined with expansive economic and social support for parents and children, would make choosing parenthood a less daunting prospect.” Others have highlighted universal paid family leave and the provision of child care for working mothers as part of an effort to create “a culture where women, children and families can flourish.” Facilitating adoptions would be another way to address unwanted pregnancies.

For open borders, surtaxes on the earnings of immigrants could be used to ameliorate any negative impact on American workers due to competition from an increase in immigrant labor. While some economists assert the existence of such impacts, others challenge those assertions.  

There is a significant incongruence in the role of government between open borders and anti-abortion policies. Open borders rests on dramatically scaling back government interference in the lives of individuals, whereas abortion prohibition constitutes an expansion of government interference. Yet both policies would protect the helpless from actions that rob them of the opportunity to survive and gain personal agency, and both could benefit the larger society. 

I was a vocal advocate of open borders for many years. Then, after the spring of 2017 or so, I fell rather silent. Not completely: I wrote the essay “Don’t Restrict Immigration, Tax It” for the Cato Institute in May 2020, summarizing my long-held views. But I think my relative silence led some to think my convictions must have changed. The amusingly-titled Michael Barone essay, “Open borders would produce dystopia, says open borders advocate,” expresses it well. I may not have officially recanted, but didn’t my writings suggest a certain halting reconsideration of long-held views?

Not at all. Or rather, I do reconsider my views, frequently… but usually I conclude that yes, I was right. The reason I fell rather silent was (a) I wasn’t sure if open borders advocacy was making freer immigration policies any more likely (“Overton window” vs. “backlash”), and (b) I had a family to support, and open borders advocacy not only absorbed time and attention without (usually) paying anything, but risked alienating people whose help and good will I would need in order to get remunerative work. 

To dispel suspicions that I’ve changed my mind, though, I thought it might be of interest to state the case for open borders as I see it now. As far as I know, it’s the same as it was five years ago, but I’m restating it now out of my head, without particularly reviewing old writings, out of curiosity about how consistent I’ve been. 

And there is one further reason, quite new, to add to my case, if not necessarily for open borders. I’ll get to that at the end.

First, there’s the utilitarian case for open borders. Migration restrictions are very inefficient because they force people to stay in countries where they’re far less productive than they might be. That makes them less happy and thriving. It also makes them less able to be of use and contribute to the flourishing of others. Open borders would empower billions of people to move to opportunity and become much more productive. Migrants’ remittances to and feedback on their countries of origin would spread the beneficent effects to non-migrants. If one believes that policy should serve “the greatest happiness of the greatest number,” in Jeremy Bentham’s time-worn (and of course somewhat ill-defined) phrase, then open borders should top the priority list. Economic estimates, though highly speculative, are the best available guesses as to what a world of open borders would look like, and roughly speaking, the median guess– a conservative guess in many ways; far more optimism could be cogently advocated– is that open borders would double world GDP.

Second, there’s what might be called the “deontological” or rights-based case for open borders, which grows out of the question of when violence may justly be used. I assume that some violence is just, for example in self-defense, or up to a point for the redress of wrongs. Indeed, I’d even insist that simple retribution, though hopefully without the passions associated with the term “revenge,” is sometimes an adequate justification for the use of force. Now, when an immigrant is prevented by force, i.e., by violence, from entering the territory of a country, that needs justification, since violence is presumptively wrong. But the peaceful immigrant has violated no one’s rights. So it’s simply not licit to use force against him. 

Now, there could be tension between these lines of argument. Often deontological and utilitarian reasoning lead to opposed conclusions, and it’s hard to settle the resulting debates. And I even think there are some edge cases under the general topic of immigration where utilitarian and deontological reasoning do collide in incompatible conclusions. For example, if X is the cousin of a ruthless terrorist, and pleads for entry into the US to keep him safe, there is reason to think he needs asylum, but also reason to fear that he is dissembling and working for the terrorist cause. Human rights (deontology) might suggest letting him in, while national security (utilitarianism) suggests keeping him out. Epidemiology also gives rise to edge cases where a likely disease bearer needs to cross an international border, yet jeopardizes the health of the domestic population.

But this is rare. The vast majority of potential migrants are not plausible terrorist threats, and don’t plausibly carry contagious diseases not already endemic in the destination country. Where restrictions of movement are needed to control the spread of contagious disease, temporary quarantine is almost always a practical and far less coercive alternative to permanent exclusion. For the vast majority of cases, I believe that the rights-based case for open borders and the utilitarian case for open borders agree and complement one another.

Third, the kind of open borders that I’ve usually advocated, involving the substitution of migration taxes for migration restrictions, would be desirable even from a more narrowly nationalist perspective that considers only the welfare of citizens of a country like the United States. Citizens would enjoy large benefits from open borders, as employers, landlords, merchants, colleagues, and investors, profiting through trade with the new immigrant masses. The economic impacts would vary widely depending on citizens endowment of “factors of production” such as land, labor power, skills, investable funds, and subtler things like connections, ability to influence policymaking, and preferences. But probably the vast majority of citizens would benefit naturally, on balance, from open borders through simple market exchange, and the government could use migration taxes and redistribution to make open borders economically advantageous for virtually all native citizens of immigrant-receiving countries.

Fourth, importantly for me, as a Christian, though not for all the likely readers of this post, is the commands of God to men through the Bible and the Christian churches. When I began advocating open borders, I thought the cause was very harmonious with the spirit of the New Testament, but that the Bible probably had a good deal that opponents could use against it, probably in the Old Testament, and that to advocate open borders so boldly might put me in an awkward position with respect to my Christian faith. Later, I did some scriptural research and discovered that I was wrong. Put bluntly, God supports open borders. There’s nothing in the Bible to give an open borders advocate pause, and everything to encourage him. It’s not just that the New Testament favors welcoming the stranger, loving enemies, and turning the other cheek. Even the Old Testament makes it very clear that ancient Israel under the divinely-inspired, though not yet “fulfilled,” law of Moses, was completely open to all willing immigrants. 

There’s another kind of urgency in the religious case for open borders. Christians are persecuted in many parts of the world, and their ability to practice their faith freely often depends on their being able to migrate to countries where they can escape persecution. Are we being faithful Christians if, by condoning the refusal of our countries’ governments to allow foreign Christians to enter, we put them at the mercy of their persecutors? Of course not. Christians must support asylum for persecuted Christians from abroad. But since it’s easy for foreigners to pretend to be persecuted Christians if laws incent them to do so– being a Christian has no external markers, after all, and government bureaucrats can hardly be relied upon to discern the sincerity of people’s professions of faith– the only practical way to meet this duty is to let in everyone.

All this, I think I’ve probably said before. At any rate, I’ve thought it before. But here’s the part of the case for open borders that is new.

On January 6, 2021, a mob stormed the US Capitol, on the instigation of then-President Donald Trump, who was fomenting a preposterous lie that he had actually won the 2020 presidential election, and that it had been “stolen.” This was a shocking breach of a tradition of peaceful, democratic transfers of power that has continued, essentially, since the very beginning of the republic. It’s not clear that there’s a plausible scenario where this mob action would have altered the election outcome, and therefore, how dire the threat to American democracy really was. Next time, we might not be so lucky. 

Through the first thirty-eight years of my life, I took for granted that American democracy was impregnable. We could argue about whether democracy was being eroded through judicial usurpations, but a direct attack on the constitutional, democratic transfer of power, though common abroad, seemed inconceivable in America. How could this have happened? 

The immediate explanation seems to lie in the personal character of Donald Trump, who always struck me as an incredibly vain and unprincipled egoist for whom nothing is sacred, least of all the American constitution. 

But that only pushes the question back further. How could 63 million Americans (in 2016) have voted for a man like that in the presidential election? How could so many millions of Republicans have voted for a man like that in the primaries, when there were so many other Republican candidates every bit as committed to core principles like support for free markets and opposition to abortion as Trump could claim to be? Trump’s depraved buffoonery wasn’t a secret, after all. That the preservation of liberty depends on virtue is a truth as old as the republic and older. Why didn’t Americans know better?

Above all, I don’t know. It’s a mystery to me. And yet, as a patriot, as someone who always planned for the American republic to outlive me, and to be there for my children and grandchildren, I can’t stop engaging in agonized guesswork to try to figure it out.

Here’s the best guess I can make.

Americans voted for an obviously immoral man because they wanted him to do something obviously immoral. There was ongoing pressure to “close the border” and “enforce the law.” That involved the expulsion of the Dreamers, people born abroad but raised in America, who knew no other home. This is so obviously indefensible, from a moral perspective, that people of a certain mind didn’t trust any politician to carry it out if they showed signs of having a conscience. Many wicked things had been done before in the name of immigration control: the expulsion of Haitians at the border to a dystopian homeland, or the exclusion of the Jewish refugees on the St. Louis in 1939. But in the past, it kind of worked to lump these evils into patriotic kitsch that might have a subtle racist dark side, or into national security boilerplate, and politicians could present a face of civic virtue while still doing these bad things. That no longer works. Conscience and realism had made enough headway that mainstream politicians were being inexorably pushed in the direction of legalizing the Dreamers. Even if politicians made anti-immigration promises on the campaign trail, in a somewhat unscrupulous effort to win power for some good purpose, upon winning office, they would be likely to reflect that it’s better– morally better– to break a promise than to deport millions of innocent people from America who have no other home. So the desperate expedient of restrictionists was to elect someone whose entire life bore witness to a total lack of conscience. And then, lacking the moral scruples to treat the Dreamers with justice, he also lacked the moral scruples to relinquish power peacefully when he lost the election.

I could be getting this all wrong. As I said, I’m baffled by the events of 2016. If there are people who somehow had better, more honorable motives than these for supporting Trump, I apologize for being unable to imagine their state of mind.

But if I’m right in my diagnosis, then our unreasonably draconian immigration laws, unenforceable by just means, are a moral cancer that is poisoning the American body politic, robbing it of the civic virtue that is needed for democracy to endure. So that’s one more reason for me urgently to support open borders, or at least to urgently desire to make the country more welcoming to immigrants. I want to open people’s eyes to the moral truth that it’s an untenable injustice to insist absolutely that no one shall reside within US borders without the express permission of the US government. Addiction to this injustice is depleting America’s indispensable supply of civic virtue and endangering the survival of the American polity. 

We need to do right on immigration to save the republic.